7. Liza Klaussman. If you’ve read Tigers in Red Weather, it will come as no surprise that the author is a huge fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but she is also the great-great-great-granddaughter of Herman Melville.

6. Patrick deWitt. I loved The Sisters Brothers and I’m looking forward to Ablutions. How can you not love an author who can sum up your entire being in two quotes?

I could not sleep without proper covering and spent the rest of the night rewriting lost arguments from my past, altering history so that I emerged victorious. (This is me.)

The things I had come to find humor in would make your honest man swoon. (This is true too.)

5. Patrick Somerville. I loved his short story collection The Universe in Miniature in Miniature. I do appreciate a good cover and great title.

4. Will McIntosh. Because everyone should give good speculative fiction a chance.

3. Owen King. He is funny and Double Feature is excellent. Also, fun trivia fact for you, he’s married to number eight on this list. They are cute together on twitter.

1. Janice Clark. I haven’t finished her debut novel The Rathbones yet, but it is good so far. Here is a bit of praise it has earned: ‘Think Moby-Dick directed by David Lynch from a screenplay by Gabriel Garcia Marquez…with Charles Addams doing the set design and The Decembrists supplying the chanteys’ (The Millions). How can you top that?

Did you know that dead bodies can get goosebumps? They can, though it’s not for the same reason living bodies do. Did you know that on July 16th Albert Einstein met with Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner? This meeting changed the world, as it set in motion the events that would create the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb.